Product testing is difficult and expensive. Large products may require separate test facilities (buildings, equipment, etc.) to perform the testing. Therefore, when a product is assembled it must be scheduled for testing, moved between facilities, and then tested. If the product does not meet desired performance criteria it must be moved into a separate maintenance area or back into the assembly area for analysis. The cause of the failure must then be determined and resolved. Current trouble shooting techniques are limited in effectiveness and usually based on educated guesses rather than actual causal determinations. Therefore, the failed product may be modified (e.g., portions of the product re-assembled) based on the recommendations of the trouble shooting procedure, but the modification may be ineffective, in which case the product again fails the follow-up test and the trouble shooting process is repeated. This type of repetitive testing and analysis is time consuming and expensive.
In addition, if the products being tested are small in nature, the inability to determine the cause of product testing failures may be expensive, especially if there is a high volume of the product. Even if the product does not go through extensive after assembly testing it may still suffer from warranty issues associated with performance failures. The inability to predict these failures prior to shipping the product leads to unnecessary and undesired cost.
The present disclosure is directed towards solving one or more of the problems set forth above.